


A Hole Where your Heart Lies

by bansheenanigans



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Anders and dramatic thinking, Bittersweet, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Guilt, Mage Hawke - Freeform, Mild ruminations on death, Moderate domesticity, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 03:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10822707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bansheenanigans/pseuds/bansheenanigans
Summary: "Anders knew that Hawke had drawn him a hundred times, over the years. He’d seen her work at it, cast glances at him and smile, let her move his hair out of his face to see his eyes better, let her stare at his hands for hours. Every moment of it felt like love, and he wouldn’t have traded it for anything. "





	A Hole Where your Heart Lies

**Author's Note:**

> If you've ever wanted a Hawke that's also an artist, this fic may be for you.  
> It's also my first fic in a decade and the first I've ever shared, so I may live to regret it.

Their bed is warm and the floor is cold this far from the hearth, but Anders finds himself there anyway, bedframe hard against his back as he stares into the dying embers of the fireplace. The window gives no hint of the hour, sky coated dark with storm clouds. It has been a particularly rainy spring in Kirkwall, which meant a good portion of Hawke's ragtag gang had been spending more and more time under her roof avoiding the puddles of Lowtown, large enough to swallow poor Merrill whole (or so Hawke had claimed, innocently, so innocently, as she settled Merrill into a couch in the library, Isabela beside her. Anders thought she was just glad to have people in the estate again). 

More nights than not these past weeks, the foyer was full of Kirkwall's finest and debatably felonious, laughing and drinking their fill at the end of a day of troubles. And all the while, Hawke had settled into a chaise with her scraps of paper and fingers stained with paint or charcoal, watching them all with warmth and a look he recognized all too well as grief. She didn't know what was coming, he couldn't bear to tell her, but in a way? He thought she knew. She felt something. She knew it was coming to an end. He watched every night as she sealed those sketches and scraps away with her things from Lothering, the things she couldn't bear to lose but couldn't bear to look at either. He understood. Sometimes he felt such agony, deep in his chest, curling a vice grip around his heart, as he understood Hemera Hawke, as she had become. As he had come to love her.  
\---------------  
When Anders had only just met Hawke, he'd been struck down by her eyes alone. Her eyes, well, it was unmistakeable, once he'd calmed down enough to really see them past fury. She hadn't even needed to tell him she was an Amell, though he'd mustered appropriate surprise when Leandra had stated it with that familiar old pride. Those golden eyes, like warm honey whiskey, were the same as her mother’s, her brother's. The same as his former Warden-Commander, and before that title, belonging to the curious and mischievous wide face of Corrine Amell, the apprentice that had always been hot in his heels in the circle. It had taken him some time to look past those familiar eyes and see just Hawke, to see Hemera, with her soft mouth and bloody red hair, golden brown skin spattered with freckles and that damned cheeky kaddis smear, short and round-hipped and so earnest. Maker, she was so earnest it hurt. 

She'd never failed to meet his eye and offer a sincere word, and Maker preserve him, he was haunted by it. Such a simple thing, and he spent years as her friend being haunted by her kindness, by that earnest look in her eyes and the gentle way she spoke to him. As if he was meant for gentleness and care and her awful, awful jokes. As if he was worth her affection. 

He thinks he fell in love with her long before she talked him into going into the damned Deep Roads. 

But if he hadn't already fallen, he did then, as improbable, as absurd as it was. Every wretched night there, the sense of Darkspawn crawling along his flesh like insects, like flesh crackling dry, he spent more awake than asleep. And for the first few nights, he thought he was the only one. But he woke with a start, again, always again, and found Hawke scrunched up next to a lingering, dying lamp, those quick fingers scrawling across a scrap of parchment. And she had looked up at him and smiled, let him sit next to her as she rubbed charcoal into the rough surface. A portrait, it had been a portrait, of a young girl, a beautiful girl with lovely dark hair and eyes and a smile that would make romantics weep. It had been beautiful. He had told her so, and she had told him it was her sister. 

"You'd have liked her," she'd said softly, running a thumb along the line of the girl's jaw. "She was a mage too. Kind, smart and talented. My baby sister was so good, without even trying. I can’t quite get it right."

He’d bit his tongue from claiming she was good, for who was he to judge that, anymore? Instead, he asked her what happened to Bethany, and he stared into that portrait as Hawke told the story softly, and his heart broke for her for the first time. 

They became quite companionable in those nights, and he often found himself falling asleep to the soft scratching of charcoal on parchment, on canvas, rock, to her soft hum and the foreign, cautious safety of that. 

The second time his heart broke for her was when Carver fell, taint crawling through his veins, and he held her steady as Stroud and the Wardens took her baby brother away. That night she didn't sleep, and on the wall, she carved Carver's portrait into the stone with a sharp chunk of rock, bloodying her hands before he and Varric had finally managed to coax her away. 

"This place has a part of Carver now. I want it to know what it took," she had whispered into the dark, and he had gently offered his hand, and held hers through the night, long after he’d healed those gored open palms. In the back of his mind, he wondered if maybe she shouldn't have carved herself in the wall as well. 

He hadn’t been there when Hawke had met Leandra at Gamlen’s home, told her mother that the Darkspawn had essentially claimed another of her children. He was weak, he thought he couldn’t handle the way Leandra and Hawke would mourn Carver, and he paid for it when Varric was by her side, and Aveline, and even Merrill, Fenris, Isabela sometimes with a bottle of awful whiskey, moving the last two Hawke’s in Kirkwall into their new home and easing their grief. 

It was some time before he managed the strength, to visit the Amell Estate and see the bare bones of the painting that was underway. It was a massive thing, propped up against the foot of her grand bed, and it was Hawke's work alone, the efforts she put in late at night after they had all gone to rest or drink. A man he didn't recognize held Leandra's hand, and that same sad, sweet girl sat beside them, while Carver stood vigilant behind the couch. Hawke was nowhere to be seen in the canvas, and he didn't ask. Both the man and Bethany's eyes were closed, and Hemera mentioned in passing, quiet and tired and a little drunk, that it was how she had decided to depict death. That it had seemed more peaceful that way.  
\-----------------  
He moved in for good the night that she painted Leandra’s eyes closed, and this time he held her tight as she wept, calloused fingers wiping away tears when hers were too slick with paint. He didn’t try to stop her. This was what she needed, more than fire, more than blood or vengeance, after she had talked to Gamlen, been blamed for it all. He hung the portrait for her, above the fireplace in her, their, bedroom, before it was even dry. And he stared up at that Hawke family portrait, at Leandra’s closed and peaceful eyes, and all he could think for one soft moment, was the tired afternoon in the bitter Darktown heat, just weeks before. The one he’d spent in his clinic, so close to breaking under his own weight, and Leandra Hawke herself had come down through the mansion cellar, her arms full with a basket of cold water in jars and homemade food, and had settled in with him. When Leandra had told him about his Hawke as a girl (and when had she become his Hawke, in his mind? When had he claimed her so selfishly?), a child always covered in paint and mud and wearing a smile, a little girl with wide dreams. Her daughter, her only remaining child, and she told him about how Hemera had dreamed of being a painter, of living quietly, before magic had risen up in her. How she had painted, at tender 8, her first staff with flowers and vines, and cried leaving it behind on the run. She told him about Hawke’s broken childhood dreams, about Malcolm’s love, about Bethany’s quiet hope, Carver’s anger and jealousy, and sat with him the whole afternoon in her good dress, until the sun began to set and he walked her back to the cellar door, the weight on his shoulders somehow lighter. And at the cellar door in Darktown, Leandra in her fine Hightown dress and he in his threadbare and ragged coat, Leandra Hawke gave him her hopes, that he and Hemera would be happy, even when it was hard. 

His arms wrapped around Leandra’s daughter now, he thought it was somehow both the Maker’s cruel hand and His blessing that Hawkes kept breaking his weary heart.  
\---------------  
Anders knew that Hawke had drawn him a hundred times, over the years. He’d seen her work at it, cast glances at him and smile, let her move his hair out of his face to see his eyes better, let her stare at his hands for hours. Every moment of it felt like love, and he wouldn’t have traded it for anything.  
But he’d never seen any of it. 

****

He’d seen everyone else’s. The nights in the Deep Roads he watched her turn Isabela’s hair into the waves of a storm, frame Varric’s face with words and Fenris with a crown of broken glass. And over the years, they’d all changed, shown who Hawke’s companions had become. Merrill’s eyes were darkened mirrors, Aveline’s chest a shield. Varric’s eyes had gotten heavier, Fenris’ features had softened, and so on, so forth. Slow changes, loving sketches, all locked away, save for the few copies Hawke gave to the subjects themselves, to varying reaction. 

He’d never seen the sketches of himself. And perhaps he had been so busy, he hadn’t asked. Needing to know how she saw him had taken a second to he and Justice’s planning and anger. But now it was soon. Justice was more restful, exultant, waiting. It was Anders, tired, beloved Anders that held that box in his lap, key in his hand, fire burnt low, but couldn’t bring himself to open it. Couldn’t bring himself to take more of her than she’d given, than he’d claimed and dragged into the holes of his heart.  
He shivers, less of cold than of fear, of guilt, and there is a crackle of a log, a soft sigh as the flames stoked themselves back to life. His breath catches as a hand brushes his hair out of his eyes again. He hadn’t heard her move, so lost in it, and he closes his eyes, presses a cheek to the side of her mattress, where she cups his face in her hands and presses a kiss to a worried brow. 

“I’m sorry.” He breathes it, feels it in the pits of his stomach. He is sorry, for everything, and for this that she caught him in, sorry for it all and forever. He doesn’t open his eyes. He can’t look at her.

The hands leave his face and reach down, and he can hear the creak in the mattress as she lifts the box gently from his lap. His hand raises, key in outstretched palm, and she takes that too. It’s so quiet, even the crackle of logs and soft pattering of the rain outside faded to nothing. It is a peace. It is an acceptance. He waits.

And hears a click, a key in a lock. Feels her hand once more on his face, thumb brushing gently over his closed eyes, then tapping softly on his long nose until he opens them again. She beckons him back up, into the bed, and he obeys her, settling back into her sheets with as much grace as he can muster, so sure of the end. 

Those warm golden eyes regard him as they always do, earnest and open and half-lidded, and he can see how tired she is. How weary he has made her, how the weight of the years has pressed into her eyes and cheeks and tried so hard to hollow them out. In the quiet, she rolls over her words with restless ache.

“No reason to be sorry, love,” there is still the trace of sleep in her throat, a soft rasp on her tongue from the day’s latest injury, and he wishes he could swallow it whole, every bit that pained her and take is as his, leave her as he found her. But he can’t. It’s too late and he is too selfish. 

She holds out a roll of parchment and canvas, a ragged thing with stained and burnt edges, tied up with a ribbon that may have been red, once, but long since sun-faded. It’s the ribbon she wore in her hair when he met her, he realizes. He can't remember the day she stopped, when the ribbon was replaced with twine or yarn, something more practical. He never even asked where it went. So many things he'd missed over the years. He takes it gently, unties the ribbon and holds it to his mouth, inhales the cinnamon of her hair still lingering there amongst the oil and charcoal and dust, the copper of blood, the bitterness of ashes. 

He unrolls the first layer of canvas and feels the tear in his chest, the place he had dedicated to Hawke and the thousand times she’d broken him without knowing. It was an older sketch, first. The oldest, most likely. His hair had slipped from the tie, obscured his eyes from the profile view as he tended to a patient in the clinic. He had looked…softer, then, as hard as it was to see. His cheeks were still thin, but fuller than they were now, and the hollows of his face, his throat, were warmer. There was something about it that felt more whole.

He couldn’t move, staring at the Anders of eight years ago, so she did for him, taking the next bit, a scrap of tent canvas from the Deep Roads, and spreading it out on his knees. He is asleep here, curled into himself, and it is sketched from above. His head is on her freckled knee, all that can be seen of her, and his brow is smoothed by her hand. Ghosted over his flesh are the barest traces, the lightest lines of cracks, but where her hand has smoothed out his forehead it is clean, and fine. 

It continues like this for a while. There are so many sketches of him, and some he can remember the time, the day they were done, or the feeling. A sketch of his back in that ragged coat, of his hands, a study of his throat with pale bruises from their first night in that bed together, the first time she’d let him take her, or she had taken him, he was never quite sure. They went on. Small sketches on scraps, half finished paintings on cut away canvasses. She had traced the years in his face, in all of their faces, but he thought, almost, he could see when she had started to love him too. He could see where he had started to love her, so clearly in his eyes. 

And then it was there. The piece he had craved to see. The painting seemed unfinished, cut off in strange places. The paint had smeared across the background, bleeding his edges into the dark blue. His eyes weren’t there, painted over and raised above the rest of the painting what seemed like a dozen times, until he couldn’t make them out. And in the center of his chest there was nothing but blank canvas, an emptiness where his heart resided. 

His mouth was empty when he looked back at her, words falling into dust as he took in the sadness in her face, the shining brightness of a line of tears barely held back.  
Gently, he places the stack of himself away, reaches out for her, and she curls into his arms like she belongs there, making him feel so weak and so strong at the same time. 

“What have I done to you, Hemera?” He nearly chokes on it, feeling his heart ache, like some sort of phantom in his chest. He knows what he’s done, but in this moment, it is less question than it is confession, painful loss in so few words. 

“You loved me,” She whispers against his chest, and her voice fills his ribs, “You loved me, and let me love you, and I watched this life eat you. It’s left you on a cliff, Anders. One step off to death, one step back to me, and I don’t…I don’t know how to paint your eyes. Are they open or closed, do I get to keep you? Or will I watch you step off that cliff?” 

“I’ll never leave you, as long as i have the choice. I love you, Hemera Hawke. I love you. You have my heart, my very soul, everything.” He lets the words be soft, to disguise the chasm budding in his ribs, the ache that will settle in later and leave him gasping, leave Justice disapproving. 

She stiffens in his arms, looks up at him with tear-stained cheeks. He lets her eyes consume him and he tries to keep from choking, from sobbing into her and losing it, telling her everything. Warning her of what he’s become.

“I don’t want your heart, Anders.” Her voice is so serious, tougher than stone and cutting just as sharply. His arms start to drop away, what he’d been expecting, fearing, all along creeping into the room. She did not want his heart. She did not want him. He had lost her, and what would he have left? The cause. His death. Justice. Nothing like Hemera Hawke’s blood red hair spread across the pillow, tickling his nose when he woke up. Nothing like the smell of cinnamon and oil sticking to his coat, sticking in his throat. Nothing like the stains on her hands, that stained his in turn, so even when he was apart from her he could see the smear of black on his palm and feel her there. Nothing at all, nothing like living, the thing he’d so unexpectedly begun to crave and need. 

“I want you to be alive. I want your heart in your chest, beating, so I can press my ear to it and hear, to know that you’re…that you aren’t…gone. That you won’t lose yourself.” Hawke finishes softly, and his eyes burn as hot as his chest has gone cold, tears spilling out and landing in her hair, on her cheek. She flinches, and in a flurry of movement, her hands are on his cheeks, her chest against his and lips pressed just under his eyes in quick succession. He lets himself fall back, and she falls with him. Her breath is hot against his jaw and she presses kisses to his cold bones as he cries, gasping, choking sobs. 

She lets him cry, curls her small, soft body around his torso and holds her hand above his heart, the other tangled in his hair, and he doesn’t know how long it is before he can rasp again. It feels like centuries. It may only be minutes. The windows and the sky offer no answers. The Maker certainly doesn’t. He doesn’t care. Here he is enveloped by his love, her memories of him, her love of him, scattered and strewn around them. And it’s so good, so painful that he can only hoarsely whisper how much he loves her, how sorry he is. How his heart is broken and old but still in his chest. He whispers to her until his voice is gone, and she hums soft lullabies into his neck after, until they both drift, connected and curled in, covered in their own history and damp with tears and breath.  
\-------------  
The rain continues on, and dimly he can hear Merrill and Isabela stirring in the library, Varric letting himself in the front door, Fenris’ sarcastic dry voice. They go on without them. Aveline and Donnic call up later, offering breakfast, and when there is no answer, the guard captain respects it, settles the rest into quiet, comforting murmurs in the sitting room before departing for her shift. The Amell, no, the Hawke estate, is alive, and it is well, and Anders and Hemera let their breaths mingle with the sound of the rain, soothed back to sleep in that safety and warmth. Hawke’s hand stays over his heart, and later he would wake to her hair tickling his nose, the cinnamon and oil smell of her clinging to him, and he would be alive, another day. He could hold it off for another day.


End file.
